Tag: ePortfolio

Just wrapping up teaching the first blog-based course I’ve done: Perspectives in Media Management. This was a “special problems” course that I offered to second-year AAD students who had expressed interest in media management, but would not be able to take courses with me this year because of my reduced teaching schedule. The new WPMU ePort platform provided a dynamic and flexible means for me to teach this ‘course’ without using a classroom, and, as an experiment I believe it was quite successful. I should note that there were six students involved in this experiment, but I think it will scale nicely next term to my other classes…

We had one physical meeting all term (in week 8), and the discussion wove back and forth between the ‘content’ of the course (case studies on issues in media management posted by each student) and the ‘frame’ of the course (the blog platform). The students’ verbal feedback during that meeting mirrored my excitement over how the course had gone, and has pushed me to reflect a bit more on using the blog format in this manner. I’ve asked them to post their own reflections on the course blog, but here are some of my thoughts intertwined with paraphrasing of the things we talked about/learned during the term:

1. The ‘frame’ of the blog invited a collaborative effort in the course that most of us hadn’t experienced previously. Many students noted that they felt involved in the flow of the course, and indicated that this was different than simply being enrolled and doing the work. Comparisons to the course management system (CMS) at UO—Blackboard—emerged at one point, and almost to a person they felt that this course would not have worked out in the same way within the toolkit offered by Blackboard (primarily the Discussion Board).

2. I felt that this collaborative dynamic gave the students ‘ownership’ in the course, and that the structure of the blog afforded such an investment. There are two qualifications I need to provide here, as I do not want to seem like I’m uncritically presenting this course as an absolute success that signals the direction everyone should go. First, I gave each student the role of “author” on the course blog—this means they could post directly to the blog when doing the main assignment (case study), and so had control over the flow and formatting of the content. Second, this was a self-selected group of students that all shared interests in ‘media management’ as an area of inquiry (and, as mentioned above, it was a small group!). I imagine that if I looked more closely at this aspect I’d be able to come up with a more precise analysis, but I’ll just say that there were likely qualitative differences between this group and the more standard ‘group’ that emerges as students enroll in a regularly-offered course. That is, this course emerged in part out of a collaborative process (students inquiries into courses to take with me preceded it), so their investment or ‘ownership’ of it was there from the beginning.

3. The format of the main assignment—case study posted by one student directly to blog, comments offered by others in course—enabled a set of conversations to emerge within and across case studies. Once the comments started, the authors of the case study post could jump in and respond to particular points or questions, allowing for observable shifts in thought or analysis. Furthermore, given the ‘archiving’ that happens on the blog, it is possible to easily go back and comb through previous posts/comments in order to trace emergent themes across all assignments. Coupled with the tagging/categorizing capabilities of WPMU, which enable an instantaneous and somewhat customizable reorganizing of the blog’s content, the archiving allows for on-the-fly remixing of course content in the moment. What I think (and hope) this might push educators and students toward is the kind of synthetic and critical thinking that is an essential aspect of higher education; getting people to think past the reading/assignment/question in front of them and back to the material that came last week or last class meeting (not to mention that which is yet to come!) has often been something I get hung up on in teaching. I’ll be looking forward to finding ways to make the blog ‘frame’ part of this synthetic thinking process…

I’m certain that the reflection process will be ongoing, especially as I move deeper into prepping courses for next term. While both of these will be the standard in-person affair, I’m hoping that relying extensively on the blog to deliver content and extend classroom discussions will be successful in the same ways this term’s experiment was. At any rate, please do visit the Perspectives in Media Management blog to check in on what the students did and leave some comments on their case studies—almost all of them drew on materials related to their master’s research projects and planned on using the blog throughout the next two terms as means for publicly seeking feedback on research-related issues.